Music

Saturday, April 16, 2016

A lot of water, legal and otherwise, has passed under the
bridge since Paul Reubens last donned the signature crisply tailored gray suit
and red bow tie of his indisputably great comic creation, Pee-wee Herman, for a
feature-length comedy. His previous Pee-wee feature, Big Top Pee-wee, debuted during the summer of 1988, 28 years ago,
and that picture was hardly anyone’s idea of a worthy follow-up to the
delirious and hilarious Pee-wee’s Big
Adventure (1985)-- it certainly wasn’t one I held too dear. When I saw PWBA the night it opened, I was actually
admonished by fellow audience members and even the management of a Medford,
Oregon movie theater for my hysterics. But though I approached the Big Top three years later with much eagerness,
I left it feeling that Pee-wee had somehow ended up getting twisted into a
formula that traded that gray suit in for something more akin to a
straitjacket. (Continued visits to the Emmy-winning Pee-wee’s Playhouse helped prove that Big Top amounted not to a trend but instead merely a misguided
anomaly.)

When Pee-wee’s Big
Adventure came out in August of 1985, Reubens was riding the crest of his
exuberantly weird (some said off-putting) appearances on Late Night with David Letterman and his Groundlings-rooted stage
show, The Pee-wee Herman Show, which
ran at the Roxy Theater in Los Angeles for five months in 1980 and gained
cultural traction as an HBO special. But Pee-wee was hardly yet a household
word. So when the strains of Danny Elfman’s buoyant, circus-inflected score
helped introduce us to this curious man-child with the trademark half-swallowed
“heh-heh” chuckle, the charmingly infantile behavior and the arsenal of
well-worn rejoinders (“I know you are, but what am I?!”) which were suddenly
funny again yet sounded strangely reassuring coming out of his mouth, we were
primed by familiarity with the Pee-wee persona but also ambushed by the
subversive energy supplied by Reubens and the movie. And as it happened, the
match of Pee-wee’s impish, slightly perverse, but ultimately charming persona
with first-time feature director Tim Burton’s sweet-tempered, macabre
inventiveness was one composed of all the most elusive and fortuitous elements
that every once in a while result in a very special sort of movie nirvana.

Now, after a long Pee-wee-less drought, Reubens and his
alter ego are back, and despite the extreme proximity of the titles and the
similarity of the advertising, the all-new Pee-wee’s Big Holiday (now streaming
on Netflix), like Big Top Pee-wee before
it, turns out to be no Pee-wee’s Big
Adventure. First question: How could it be? The appeal of the character is
no longer grounded in collective surprise at Reubens’ commitment to the world
of Pee-wee, but instead in nostalgia, and not just for the candy-colored
perspective of children (and children’s television) but for our memories of
Pee-wee himself.

The second question is, does it have to be as good as Pee-wee’s
Big Adventure? And the answer, happily enough, is no, because even absent
Tim Burton’s visual conjurings, and even though Big Holiday sticks close to the template devised by Reubens and
cowriters Phil Hartman and Michael Varhol in the first film, the new movie
finds its own vein of weirdly-inflected sweetness. Though it may be more
conventionally realized, unlike Big Top
this new holiday delivers the laughs and continually reminds you, in the most
satisfying ways, why Pee-wee Herman was always somebody worth spending time
with.

One of the hurdles Pee-wee’s
Big Holiday has to clear right away is the fact that, yes, 28 years has
passed since we last saw Pee-wee, and even though the character may be an
ageless man-child, Paul Reubens, like the rest of us, is not. (Ageless, that
is.) Some expert, innovative and not all that uncommon movie magic provided the digital
retouching necessary to smooth over the 63-year-old actor into a reasonable
facsimile of his Pee-wee prime, and the result admittedly requires a couple of
minutes to adjust to. Coincidentally, that’s just about as long as it takes to
be charmed anew by the character’s mere presence, as he launches himself
through a delightfully Rube Goldbergian routine which propels him to work every
day, slinging hash at a diner where everybody in the romantically retro town of
Fairville comes for breakfast every morning, where everybody knows Pee-wee’s
(and everyone else’s) name.

Pee-wee has been feeling dissatisfied with life of late— the
other members of his rock combo, a clean-cut, letterman-jacketed bunch known as
the Renegades (Oh, the life Pee-wee lives that we only get incidental peeks
at!), are letting the responsibilities of nighttime bowling leagues and late
shifts at the grocery store break up the band, and the resulting frustration
has Pee-wee feeling the itch to break out of his small-town routine and “live a
little.” Enter, on a motorcycle, actor Joe Manganiello, who stops into the
diner for a milk shake, forms an immediate and unshakable bond with our hero
and suggests that Pee-wee can dust off the hometown blues and get to the work
of taking some chances, something Pee-wee, whose entire existence seems
preserved in a time capsule filled with days past that never quite existed in
the first place, has been till now hesitant to do.

Joe is having a big birthday party in New York City in five
days, to which he suggests Pee-wee attend. But rather than strapping his new
pal on the back of the bike, Joe wants Pee-wee to make it there on his own, a
better opportunity for stretching those wings and taking those chances, to say
nothing of getting Pee-wee’s Big Holiday’s
road trip structure firmly in place. That voyage itself is a more conventional
wrinkle on the epic journey Pee-wee undertook in pursuit of his stolen bike in PWBA, which was inspired in part by, of
all things, Vittorio de Sica’s Bicycle
Thieves. But no matter—it gets our boy moving forward and into the various
entanglements, exhilarations and other hijinks that make up this exuberant
highway vacation.

Pee-wee’s Big Holiday
is basically a string of episodes that finds Pee-wee running up against all
manner of oddball Americana on his way to that Manhattan party, some of which
work better than others, most of which rely more on Reubens’ inventiveness than
on solid punchlines to get to the laughs. At one point Pee-wee is plopped down
in the middle of an epic “farmer’s daughter” scenario which, disappointingly,
avoids the inevitable and ends up fizzling out. And Reuben’s reunion with PWBA costar Diane Salinger (one of many
blink-and-you-missed-it appearances by Pee-wee veterans) doesn’t result in much
either. Salinger was the wistful waitress in the 1985 movie who sat with Pee-wee
in the mouth of a giant T. rex mockup, staring at the stars and dreaming out
loud of possible futures. Here she returns as a Katherine Hepburn-inflected Amelia
Earhart stand-in, a charming and welcome presence as far as she is allowed to
go. Unfortunately, she functions largely just to get Pee-wee from point C to
point D along his journey, the “D” in this case standing for drenched in raging
river rapids. (Spoiler alert: he survives.)

But the occasional fizzle is more than balanced out by the
movie’s screwy spirit of optimism, which is, of course, completely a by-product
of Reubens’ commitment to and connection with his audience, and some set pieces
that work like the Pee-wee gangbusters of old. His antagonistic encounter with
a trio of busty Russ Meyer-inspired bank robbers straight out of Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! is good for
a load of big laughs and conceptual chuckles,
and the actresses sculpted into pneumatic approximation of Meyer’s cartoony
pulchritudinous ideals turn out to be perfectly pitched shrews with hearts of
gold. (Their ringleader, Jessica Pohly, might make you think Tura Satana is
alive and very well, and Alia Shawkat, as a switchblade-wielding tigress poured
into a cashmere sweater who shares our hero’s name, won my heart as easily as
she does Pee-wee’s.) The circumstances that have these super vixens stealing
his car, then showing up later to snarl at and complicate life further for our
hero, comprise a classic case of how, in the Reubens/Pee-wee universe, turning
over a nasty rock often reveals a happy surprise of humanity underneath.

And I got the biggest laughs I’ve had over a movie in a long
time when one of the Amish folks who end up giving Pee-wee a lift in their
horse-drawn buggy stumbles over an unfamiliar F-word and asks him what he does
for “fu-un.” At which point Pee-wee pulls a balloon out of his pocket and
resurrects one of his goofiest routines, the dizzy-headed inflation of said
balloon followed by a hilariously extended squeak-fest (with deliriously silly
facial accompaniment) as the air escapes. If you watch the linked clip, notice how the Amish characters milling about in the background
behind Pee-wee slowly disappear, only to reappear as the bit’s sublime visual
punch line, a moment that in the hands of numerous other sardonically inclined
comics might have had a nastier, or at least more predictably ironic
inflection, but which here plays out as pure Pee-wee-inspired cheer. That’s the
way to freshen up a familiar bit.

But probably the cheer-cheer-cheeriest element of Pee-wee’s Big Holiday is Pee-wee’s awed,
newly minted friendship with Manganiello which, like Pee-wee’s friendship with
the Russ Meyerettes or the Amish, trucks not in ironic barriers or red flags blaring
“Obvious, Barely Concealed Subtext!” No, Joe and Pee-wee straight-up bond over
their mutual love for a good milk shake and, even better, a root beer barrel
chaser (“Only the best candy in the world! It really is!”), and the result is one
of the funniest and sweetest, not to mention least self-conscious male-bonding
episodes in the history of comedy. Joe, the cool, self-regarding, image-conscious
actor, is disarmed immediately when Pee-wee doesn’t seem to know who he is. (Pee-wee
butchers his last name in high Herman fashion.) And Reuben’s response to Joe’s listing
of his credits is pure bliss-- “Certainly you’ve heard of True Blood.” “Uh-uh.” “Magic
Mike?” “(chuckles) You’d think so, but no.” Added bonus: my own enjoyment
of the scene was enhanced by the fact that before this movie I didn’t know who
Joe Manganiello was either!

The two performers are the most unlikely combination of
pals, but that’s what makes the joke expand into something more, something
resembling the inexplicable essence of true friendship, and that neither of
them winks at the audience or does anything to undermine its foundations seems,
in this age where no eyebrow seems to go unarched, something approaching
nobility. It all comes to an emotionally satisfying conclusion when Pee-wee
finally arrives in Manhattan but ends up late to Joe’s party (I won’t spoil
why), and Joe puts off all his other guests and hides out in the bedroom of his
luxury penthouse, distraught that his pal Pee-wee didn’t show up.

But don’t worry, kids-- neither Reubens nor Pee-wee would
ever stand for sending you out of the theater, or in this case your Netflix
queue, with anything less than a smile on your face, and Pee-wee’s Big Holiday, as uneven as the holiday journey sometimes
is, has barrels full of smiles (root beer barrels!) at the ready. Paul Reubens
may have had to have his face digitally tightened up to remind us of the
Pee-wee of old (rather than an old Pee-wee), but the unreserved good news is
that in 2016 Pee-wee’s high, garrulously anarchic spirit remains gloriously
intact and ready to inspire laughter once again, no CGI required.